Customer Reviews

Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls: A Coloring Book

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My 5 year old son and I had a great conversation just about the cover of this book and what gender each character was and how we can tell. He's a bit young for the rest of it but he'll enjoy coloring it and will grow into the message, I think.

Given the heteronormativity and reactionary gender stereotypes pervasive in most children's literature, this thought-provoking coloring book is a wonderful intervention, challenging kids to interrogate patriarchal gender and sexual orientation dichotomies. It is also a fun consciousness-raising tool for adults struggling to unlearn a lifetime of sexist and heterosexist (mis)education and media saturation. With sexist, homophobic, and transphobic violence being such a major problem in our schools and communities, not to mention the high number of suicides among LGBT youth, such material is enormously important. Besides buying a copy for yourself and your children, how about donating one to your local school, library, chapter of PFLAG, or LGBT youth group? I'd also encourage you (if you can) to buy some non-toxic, non-GMO soy or beeswax crayons to color it with as petroleum-based crayons are obviously bad for the environment!

As with their other titles, these authors have little sense of what draws a child's eye or child's ear.

If your child likes to color with microfine pencil, maybe they'd enjoy filling in the tiny spaces on these non-crayon, non-appealing illustrations. The cover is well chosen, as it is about the only fun one in the book.

I think they passed around a hat at a senior wimmin's drum circle and in the interest of egalitarian community, printed every single person's suggestion so none would feel excluded. So we have gems like "girls against gender assignment" and "me and tommy got 98% on our man tests. what did you get" and "dad, after we're done cleaning, let's go make some quiche together" plus heartwarming drawings of girl (in wheelchair, of course) shaving boys armpits.

Why cant pc be WITTY? Why can't gender awareness, oh, I don't know, have some clever puns or rhymes?

Eyerolling aside, the kids -- who would love a chance to color boy ballerinas and kick ass girls -- were bored to death.

That is until I noticed the handy worksheet that comes with the book -- imagine how things heated up with the 4-8 year olds when I offered them such hot discussion topics as "what privileges do you or don't you have due to the gender you've been labeled"?

You get the picture. Where is our wiccan Dr. Scarry? Our feminist Dr. Seuss?? Certainly not here.

If you thought kids were being raised in a gender confused culture before, just wait! It can get worse!

This book is filled with pictures which are humorousness to us as adults but which could be harmful to children who find it hard enough to connect with their masculinity or their femininity in our grey, gender neutral world. It does not help boys develop into men nor girls develop into women in a healthy way. What is amusing for us as adults is unfortunately being used to hurt kids.

I do not know the authors so I do not wish to accuse, but I do wonder if this was just humour gone wrong or if it was politically motivated to introduce transgenderism to children.

I write as a parent of four... two sons, two daughters.